| 18285 | All translation loses some content (but language does not create reality) [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: I do not believe in translatability without loss of content, and therefore I think that the content of a world description is influenced to a certain degree by choice of a language form. But that does not mean that reality is created through language. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Letters to Schlick [1935], 1935.12.04), quoted by J. Alberto Coffa - The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap 19 'Truth' | |
| A reaction: It is a mistake to think Quine was the first to spot the interest of translation in philosophy of language. 'Does translation always lose content?' is a very nice question for focusing the problem. |
| 23489 | We translate by means of proposition constituents, not by whole propositions [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: When translating one language into another, we do not proceed by translating each proposition of the one into a proposition of the other, but merely by translating the constituents of propositions. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921], 4.025) | |
| A reaction: This seems opposed to Quine's later holistic view of translating whole languages. Is he objecting to Frege's context principle? |
| 19045 | Translation is too flimsy a notion to support theories of cultural incommensurability [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Translation is a flimsy notion, unfit to bear the weight of the theories of cultural incommensurability that Davidson effectively and justly criticises. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On the Very Idea of a Third Dogma [1981], p.42) | |
| A reaction: I presume he means that a claim to accurately translate something is false, because there is no clear idea of what a good translation looks like it. I just don't believe him. The practice of daily life belies Quine's theories on this. |
| 12591 | Mastery of a language requires thinking, and not just communication [Harman] |
| Full Idea: If one cannot think in a language, one has not yet mastered it. A symbol system used only for communication, like Morse code, is not a language. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1.2) | |
| A reaction: This invites the question of someone who has mastered thinking, but has no idea how to communicate. No doubt we might construct a machine with something like that ability. I think it might support Harman's claim. |
| 4706 | Early Quine says all beliefs could be otherwise, but later he said we would assume mistranslation [O'Grady] |
| Full Idea: In his earlier work, Quine defended the view that no belief (including logic) is in principle unrevisable, but in his later work (1970) he took the conservative view that we would always impute mistranslation rather than deviancy. | |
| From: Paul O'Grady (Relativism [2002], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: I take it he was influenced by Davidson's 'principle of charity'. He says that if someone asserts 'p and not-p', we would assume a misunderstanding of 'and' or 'not'. |
| 17991 | Holism says language can't be translated; the expressibility hypothesis says everything can [Hofweber] |
| Full Idea: Holism says that nothing that can be said in one language can be said in another one. The expressibility hypothesis says that everything that can be said in one language can be said in every other one. | |
| From: Thomas Hofweber (Inexpressible Properties and Propositions [2006], 6.4) | |
| A reaction: Obviously expressibility would only refer to reasonably comprehensive languages (with basic logical connectives, for example). Personally I vote for the expressibility hypothesis, which Hofweber seems to favour. |